Seduced into collaboration: A resource-based choice experiment to explain knowledge acquisition strategies of SMEs

When engaging in innovation projects firms need to choose if they develop new knowledge through internal R&D, to buy the knowledge from another party or to jointly develop the knowledge in collaboration with others like... [ view full abstract ]

When engaging in innovation projects firms need to choose if they develop new knowledge through internal R&D, to buy the knowledge from another party or to jointly develop the knowledge in collaboration with others like universities or suppliers. As such, the firm can choose from three knowledge acquisition strategies (KASs). This study predicts the conditions under which firms that engage in an innovation project choose a specific KAS. This is done by linking the KASs to a series of attributes of the innovation project using a discrete choice experiment that is conducted on 427 small- and medium sized enterprise (SMEs). Moreover, we identify four latent classes of firms that have distinctive choice patterns: 1) externally oriented firms; 2) internally oriented firms; 3) collaborators; and 4) flexible firms. We demonstrate that the choices for a KAS are related to the past behavior of the firm and only externally oriented firms or flexible firms are likely to change their KAS. Moreover, universities are not preferred collaboration partners. We give policy recommendations to increase the level of interaction between universities and SMEs, and discuss their effectiveness.